rench novel, whose strained sentiment and
deeply logical immorality have wakened strange echoes among us of the
stricter rule and graver usage.

Without passion, then, or tender affection on either side, but with a
tolerable harmony of views for the moment, and after long and causeless
opposition on the part of Aurore's mother, this marriage took place.
Aurore was but eighteen; her bridegroom was of suitable age. With dreams
of a peaceful family existence, and looking forward to maternity as the
great joy and office of the coming years, she brought her husband to
Nohant, whose inheritance had been settled by contract upon the children
of this marriage.

But these dreams were not to be realized. Aurore was not born to be the
companion of a dull, narrow man, nor the Lady Bountiful of a little
village in the heart of France. Would she not have had it so? She tells
us that she would; and as honesty is one of her strong points, we may
believe her. She knew not the stormy ocean of life, nor the precious
freight she carried, when she committed the vessel of her fortunes to so
careless a hand as that of M. Dudevant. She throws no special blame or
odium upon him, nor does he probably deserve any.

The recital of the events spoken of above brings us well into the eighth
volume of the "Histoire de ma Vie"; and as there are but ten in all, the
treatment of the things that follow is pursued with much less
detail, and with many a gap, which the malevolent among our author's
contemporaries would assure us that they know well how to fill up.
Between the extreme reserve of the last two volumes and the wild
assertions of so many we would gladly keep the _juste milieu_, if
we could; but we wish only truth, and it is not at the hands of the
scandalmongers of any society--is it?--that we seek that commodity. The
decree of the court which at a later day gave her the guardianship
of her children, and the friendship of many illustrious and of some
irreproachable men, must be accepted in favor of her of whom we
write,--and the known fanaticism of slander, and the love of the
marvellous, which craves, in stories of good or evil, such monstrous
forms for its gratification, cause us, on the other side, to deduct
a large average from the narrations current against her. But we
anticipate.

Aurore, at first, was neither happy nor unhappy in her marriage. Her
surroundings were friendly and pleasant, and the birth of a son, a third
Maurice, soon b